'What Should We Do?'

Rising high into the sky at an angle with the unseen wind, a massive tower of smoke billowed up into the sky like the long neck of some titanic beast raising its head into the clouds. There were immense tongues of flame licking up through the smoke visible even from this distance, but the surrounding forestry and uneven terrain blocked the town itself from view. This was far more smoke than just one or two buildings burning, it seemed as though the entire town was ablaze.

Even though the fire was taking place over a week's walk away from our current positions, Eman and Layla still looked to the silent Gryn and asked, "What should we do?"

Glancing at me briefly as if hoping I had an answer, Gryn sees only surprise on my face and says, "There's nothing we CAN do. If it was just an accident or arson, it would be handled already, but that… that looks like the place is being raided by bandits."

"Whatever it is, if its an enemy with numbers great enough to sack a town, they probably won't stop there," he continues after a few moments of looking around at the others.

"There's a small fishing and lumbering village between our town and Arguston, if nobody in town knows what's going on then the village will probably send word seeking help or evacuate to our town. We'll know what's going on when we get home, let's move," he says at last, turning and jogging away at a slow but steady marching pace.

The others quickly followed suit. I already knew that the others would not be able to maintain such a pace for more than an hour, but with the way stats and stamina worked out in this world we ended up alternating between marching and plain walking all the way to the river.

Once there, we stopped for about ten minutes to lighten my load of mana stew and some local healing herbs to increase our vitality for the march.

Likewise, we did not stop again until it was time to make camp and even then I volunteered to stay awake all night again. If I absolutely needed to, I could use magic to keep myself awake and energized for a few days at a time. Afterward, though, I would fall into a light coma for a day or so before awakening in an even worse state than this morning.

For this march I would only need to maintain until tomorrow night and repeat this morning when it rolls around. Not much happened during the night and with a need to conserve energy I did not bother expanding my awareness more than twenty or so yards out from camp.

I mostly just sat and meditated on the mana coursing through my mind, body, and being so that I spent most of the night in the nothingness of my soul.

When morning's light started creeping into the sky, I promptly got up and started prepping the stew with more herbs and wild foods. Once the stew was once again hot and ready, I started shameless waking the others up by kicking and yelling at them. It was simply the easiest and quickest method.

Once everybody had eaten and woke up, I affixed the granite cauldron back to my ruck rack and followed along behind the others as we set off marching once again. I could tell the pace was already wearing hard on the others despite the magic stew, but there was little to be done about it. Except taking two more rest stops today than we did yesterday to feed ourselves and wisps.

When evening once again rolled around, I ate some stew and went right to sleep so that when I woke up the next morning it would be bright and early. We had already reached the spot where we initially met up with the river yesterday afternoon, so after another couple of hours we would turn off from the river and start making our way back to the east highway from town.

Coincidentally, if one kept heading eastward along the highway from town they would eventually come to a lumber and fishing village and further on for another few days would be Arguston.

After waking everybody up once the stew was ready, we quickly tended our wisps with the dwindling energy contained with the crystalline orb. Once the orb was empty, I simply shattered it on the ground by enhancing my Strength with magic and lead the way away from camp. The orb held all of the magic signatures from the array, the wisps, and possibly even the interactions of the echoes.

A powerful mage could study the residues and reverse engineer my array and processes, but only if they had the entire set of signatures. Shattered and scattered, the orb was simply missing too much dust to be of any real use to someone besides me. Besides looking pretty, it was also useless now that it had run out of mana because it would never be able to hold the same amount or quality of energy again.

By the time we left the river to start trekking through the forestry, the forestry itself had already begun to thin out from our proximity to civilization. With our alternating pace, we had already shaved well over a day from our original travel time. And we did not let up at all.

We finally made it back to the tamped but rutted clay highway around the time evening rolled around, covering the clearer ground much faster than the distant forestry. However, we did not stop and continued marching all the way home where everybody followed Gryn and I through the unsurprisingly busy streets.

Even now approaching midnight there were mounted people and drawn wagons heading in and out of town along the road we just came in on. Many of the wagons contained people who were disembarking from their vehicles, but we had passed just as many more with materials and supplies heading eastward. The people in the wagons were mostly old people and kids with a few pregnant women and young adults mixed in to watch over everybody.

These were obviously evacuees from the neighboring village or even survivors from Arguston, but there was too much going on for us to bother anyone with questions. Gryn's friends followed us all the way to our home, probably assuming that our parents would have more information than theirs because of their Guild affiliations. When we got home, though, it was to find that a large canvas structure like a military tent was put up in our front yards.

Several small families were now being housed in this shelter together and it was inside that we found my parents helping settle children into bed and feeding everyone. When we arrived, my mother cried out in joyful surprise and rushed over to ensnare Gryn and I in a tight embrace. Our father was much more relaxed despite whatever circumstances we were in, but he remained silent.

In fact, when Gryn started to ask about what was going on, he merely gave him a sharp look and shook his head. Augmented by my father's angrily arched eyebrows, this look was not one to be argued with.

After a while we ended up helping the kids settle down by telling them the gist of our hunting trip and showing off the trophies of our best kills. In the end, we left the ferret beasts roasted, or cured, bodies with the evacuees to make things easier on them. After this, my parents finally led us out of their tent and to the entrance of the property. There we were finally allowed to talk.

"It's bad," my father replies with an unreadable look on his face. "You guys probably saw Arguston burning the other day, but that's just half of it. The town got sacked by a traveling company of goblins and their leaders use dark magic and necromancy. With all the dead they collected at Arguston, they've already moved down the road toward Iramill."

Picking up where my father leaves off, Mom says, "To minimize our losses and increases to their numbers, Iramill has been evacuated here and we're currently rigging their village with magic traps and everything we can think of. Eventually, though, they're going to make their way here."

"How long before they reach Iramill?" Gryn and I ask at exactly the same time. If there was enough time for me to get to that village, I could probably set up both chemical and magic explosives to welcome the necromancer goblins.

However, my father simply states, "Tomorrow around noon is what the town guard and Guild scouts estimate, and we're constantly being updated. We're mostly done working on Iramill, but we're deciding if we meet them on the highway or allow them to siege our town. If we meet them, it will be with a smaller force than in the siege defense, but that smaller force would have greater freedoms."

"We could give a hundred archers each one of my exploding arrows and see what happens," I murmur under my breath, thinking of the intense thermal-kinetic expansion of my enchanted glass arrows.

My mother actually seemed to consider this idea seriously, which made my father look at her in some confusion, but then she shook her head and said, "That would be something we would need in the event of a retreat, not something to lead with. If the leaders survived an attack like that, they would just run away and regroup to attack other places.

"I still have to original arrows I caught you making, that few dozen should be plenty to cover a retreat from around the highway," she adds with a knowing look in my direction. Then, her eyes narrowed as she seemed to glare at my chest before looking around at Gryn and his friends in the same fashion. "What the hell have you kids been doing to get wisps like THOSE?"

After that question finally came out, I took out my enormous death and dark wisps to show off with a prideful smile and said, "I discovered how to concentrate wild magic into an area large enough to spawn wisps and then experimented with how to change the alignment of the mana in the area. The mixed energies spawned different wisps.

"Purely by coincidence, I found and killed an echo to add its darkness affinities to the mana array and it caused the wisp spawner to become an echo spawner for a little while until it created this giant abomination and I had to purify the area to stop their spawning. On the bright side, I used Gryn's friends in my experiment to see about giving non-magical people magical affinities."

Mom looked surprised, proud, and furious all at the same time while my father simply looked confused. Finally, my mother simply sighed and said, "We don't have the time for me to lecture you on how morally and legally wrong some of this is, we'll just need to have your friends sign a blood contract to never reveal this information and YOU will have to sign one to never do these experiments again."

"We'll need to negotiate the specifics, but you're right that now's not the time for that," I reply cheekily with a sly smile. I mean, if she really did ban me from experimenting in general, then I might as well stop studying magic in general.

*